Connecting with our friends in the Pacific

Check out those big smiles! Maybe it’s because they were in SUVA. Last year in October, Chris and Dave attended a UN meeting at the United Nations’ office as part of a task force that is heading up a new IXP in the Pacific.

The Pacific IXP project is a new initiative that will form a multi-country IXP in the South Pacific region – built to Fiji, Samoa and New Zealand. In future, nine other countries can connect and will have better access to content within the region.

So far a task force has been formed, comprising UN ESCAP, Paul Brooks, Elly from APNIC, NZIX (Chris and Dave), representatives from the Samoan Government and SAM-IX and representatives from the Fijian Government and Telecommunications authority. They are hoping to create an organisation that owns the hardware and operates independently, but is run by a committee. Initial surveys with the countries that we’re targeting are on-going. So far, the responses are positive and it shows that there is interest from local ISPs in those countries to connect to the Pacific IXP.

NZIX is assisting in this project in a number of ways. Our Committee can offer valuable expertise in running IXPs and assistance in managing existing relationships with many content and cloud providers. There is also potential to provide pseudo-wires or similar to build the network.

For more information, you can watch an update that Chris provided at NZNOG here, and also Dave’s lightning talk from APRICOT, which you can watch here.

Stay connected with us on social media and keep an eye out for our future newsletters for updates on this great project.